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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29858604">drowned things, too, can learn to breathe again</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreyhui/pseuds/earlgreyhui'>earlgreyhui</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>RWBY</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Future Fic, Gen, M/M, Post-Canon, and have long conversations about their shitty lives, i lied that's part 2 of the fic, that's it that's the fic, very self-indulgent, whitley and oscar stay together alone in a huge manor with their father figure butler</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 00:27:33</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>8,527</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29858604</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreyhui/pseuds/earlgreyhui</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>Oscar curls in on himself, drawing his knees closer into his chest so he can rest his chin on them. Again, the stars flicker, drowned, in the bottomless pool of his dark eyes. “I want to go to one of the huntsmen academies,” he says, abruptly, and does laugh then, startled, a staccato burst sharp enough to shake some clarity back into the foggy surface of Whitley’s sleep-deprived mind. “You’re the first person I’ve told that. I guess it’s because I don’t know you.”</p>
  <p>“You should go,” Whitley says. “You should get to live again. Reincarnate. Like the old man.”</p>
  <p>Oscar shakes his head, laughing. “It’s a silly idea. But he’d like that, I suppose. In all his lifetimes, I think he liked being a headmaster best.”</p>
</blockquote><p>After the war, Oscar stays in the Schnee manor.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Oscar Pine &amp; Whitley Schnee, Oscar Pine/Whitley Schnee, Weiss Schnee &amp; Whitley Schnee, Weiss Schnee &amp; Whitley Schnee &amp; Winter Schnee, Whitley Schnee &amp; Winter Schnee</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>31</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>drowned things, too, can learn to breathe again</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>A couple of things:</p>
<p>• This fic is set 2-3 years ahead of current canon (Atlas arc). I don't know if the war with Salem can actually be drawn out that long, given the pacing of the show, but I'm messing with the timeline so I can age my characters up in peace.</p>
<p>• In this universe the major difference is that Weiss and Whitley never had the 'reconciliation' they had in the show, because that was rushed and a complete joke and both of them deserve better! Instead they work through their issues after everything is over.</p>
<p>• I'm deliberately being a bit vague on how exactly the final stand went down, because it's not really relevant to this particular story, but I suppose the gods came back to earth and Salem managed to achieve final peace by offing herself. Ozma, too, has managed to pass on at last and so Oscar is once more alone in his head. Jacques was only formally tried and charged after the war because before that they honestly had more important things to deal with, so between his arrest and now, control over the company was handed over to the board of directors.</p>
<p>• Last thing! This can be read as gen snowpines or as a ship, whichever you prefer.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The world ends in a flood of silver.</p>
<p>High above the world in a frozen manor that never does anything but echo with the wailing of the living and the dead alike, Whitley Schnee stands at a window in the war room and watches the sky, blotted dark with the grotesque bodies of Grimm descending on the earth in infinite hordes. The ground shakes with the distant boom of explosions. Each one streaks the sky with colour like dying stars, burning holes into storm clouds of black flapping wings that only seem to fill themselves back up in the same moment they are opened.</p>
<p>Whitley stands through it all, perfectly still, his pale blue gaze fixed unblinking on the end of the world and his right hand thumbing the signet ring on his middle finger unconsciously. Flashes of light play over his face like the slides of a magic lantern. Faint piercing screams from people torn apart by Grimm float through the glass, from a very long way away, as if heard from underwater.</p>
<p>This is how it ends:</p>
<p>The world, bathed in a terrible blinding silver light that lays all things bare for judgement without discrimination; reverse black hole and its event horizon expanding outward and outward, washing the world clean, erasing all time and space and the very concept of what it is to exist.</p>
<p>With the light, a sudden silence, perfect and absolute and powerful. A breath held tight in cosmic lungs, galactic heartbeat stilled, true silence as it is never really known.</p>
<p>No one remembers when the light fades, or how the world shifts back into motion, achingly, a titanic beast lifting itself shudderingly to resume its inexorable, lumbering path. It takes time for the spots to clear from people’s visions, for the ringing in their ears to cease. But when their senses return, they see a clear blue sky; they see the sun, in its graceful arc up over the horizon, rebirthing the world everywhere its light touches.</p>
<p>Only when all of it is over does Whitley move again. Trembling, in halting increments. As if his muscles had forgotten how to make his bones move.</p>
<p>And so the world ends in a flood of silver.</p>
<p>But in that same flood, in the rush of the roaring tide, is it born anew.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p> </p>
<p>After the war, Weiss returns to the manor. Whitley is there, at the window in his bedroom, when she approaches. She comes up the hill with her full entourage of warrior friends trailing her confident step, some walking with a limp from unseen injuries and others with simple fatigue visible in the slope of their shoulders, but all of them sharp-eyed. Whitley picks out things he remembers from the last time they visited, more than two years ago now—a red cloak bright as a slash of blood among their company, a head of matted sunshine-gold hair, a faded forest green tunic on a set of shoulders sterner and wider than he remembers them last—and when they come close enough that he can see the glint of the sun on his sister’s hairpiece, leaves the window to go out to the main staircase.</p>
<p>“Klein,” he hears Weiss’s voice say in echoes in the atrium’s soaring arches, tired but still clear as a bell and composed. There is relief there, though, softening its intransigent diamond edges. “You’re here.”</p>
<p>“My snowflake,” comes the reply, in Klein’s lower voice that drifts up through the banisters, warm and harder to hear but unmistakeable. “You’re hurt. But you’re safe—alive—I knew you would be, I never doubted you for a second—”</p>
<p>There is a silence. Whitley holds his breath, fingers curled tight in the swirling patterns of the iron railings, and imagines the soft thump that comes next, of Weiss colliding with Klein in a desperate hug. A few moments pass, that he measures in his own heartbeats counted off one by one, before someone speaks again. It is a female voice. Rough, the type more suited to shouting and boisterous laughter, but infinitely gentle at the present moment.</p>
<p>“Weiss?”</p>
<p>High heels stutter on the floor in a series of unsteady steps like a waterfall of hollow notes tripping over each other. Then, Weiss’s voice again; she clears her throat before speaking.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry. Klein, could you prepare rooms for everyone? There will be time enough for introductions later. Blake, Jaune and Emerald here need medical attention, so if you could see to that, please.”</p>
<p>“We’re sorry to impose,” someone says. Whitley has to strain to make out the words. A few other people echo variations on the same sentiment, their voices blending to sound like running water, indistinguishable.</p>
<p>There are more footsteps then, crunching with snow from the ground outside and scuffing on the floor in a way that Whitley might have cringed to hear once upon a time but now barely blinks at. Interspersed in between are the thumps of the party’s scant travelling bags being swung onto the floor and lifted again to be carried away. Whitley embellishes the rhythms with a light drumming of his fingernails on the top of the railing, deliberate and precise and too quiet for anyone but him to hear.</p>
<p>The next words he hears, he expects. Weiss says, a shade apprehensively, in a softer voice that carries anyway in that musical way of hers— “And my brother, Klein?”</p>
<p>Whitley is already standing. He takes a step down the staircase, and then another and another; he rounds the corner and there they are, a ragtag bunch very much present and real in all their vivid colours, bright against the stark monochrome backdrop of the manor.</p>
<p>No one sees him at first; there he stands on the landing, unnoticed, blunt fingernails biting into his left palm where he hides it behind his back as he fights the urge to run. Then—Weiss turns slightly—makes eye contact with him all of a sudden in a moment that comes down on the two of them like thunder. Her blue eyes widen.</p>
<p>Whitley stands where he is, and does not flinch.</p>
<p>Silence falls on the atrium. Someone is looking. Maybe all of them are looking. Whitley does not take his eyes off Weiss’s face to check. Her huge doll’s eyes, blue as crisp ice, are all he can see. He feels his spine like a glass rod in his back, stiff in habitually perfect posture—and his hand behind his back, relaxed from its fist but shaking slightly.</p>
<p>Weiss’s eyes start to grow blurry. The light reflected in them warps with wetness, like smudged lamplight through a car’s windshield on a rainy night, and he does not know where the water is, in his eyes or hers or both.</p>
<p>As in all their encounters, he speaks first.</p>
<p>“Welcome home, sister,” he hears in his voice, as if from the end of a very long tunnel.</p>
<p>Weiss’s face crumples. She runs forward.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p> </p>
<p>There is so much to be done as the new CEO of the Schnee Dust Company, and despite the glaring presence of his new houseguests evident in all the littlest traces scattered about the manor, Whitley soon falls into a pattern of living that they fall just as naturally into, a skilfully choreographed dance that ensures their paths never cross. He has dinners for five nights straight with executives and old partners of the firm eager to meet the young new family head and get their hooks in him—in the SDC’s monopoly over the market—before their competitors can. Every one of them meets him with an insolent spark in their eyes that speaks of their desire to test how far they can bend him, to ascertain how much to their advantage they can set the board before the game begins anew. In response Whitley channels every scrap of imperiousness and cool sarcasm he ever learned from his father, standing at his side in board meetings like a dutiful shadow as he absorbed every detail of every exchange and every veiled meaning concealed in polite conversation, and now makes it clear to each and every one of them that they will find no weak heir here to make their puppet. At the end of every dinner dealing with his father’s ambitious partners he is left exhausted, his mind worn out from hours of playing the extended game of chess that masquerades as these appointments. Every final outmanoeuvre he pulls off or temporary impasse he secures comes harder than the last, after each of which he drags himself to his bedroom, located in an entirely separate wing from the one where Weiss and her friends are staying, and sleeps like the dead until the next morning where he must repeat the entire charade again. On the morning of the sixth day, he rises and calls for Klein to ask for his schedule for the day.</p>
<p>In the absence of a secretary, Klein has been a godsend, efficiently juggling his duties as butler and keeping track of Whitley’s schedule at the same time. On this day, he looks at Whitley reproachfully over the top of the silver dome which covers the breakfast he has brought for him, and says, “You do not have anything lined up for the day, young master.”</p>
<p>Whitley blinks at him in incomprehension. “What?” he asks blankly.</p>
<p>“Master Whitley—” sternly, in a tone that brooks no argument— “Do pardon my presumptuousness, but you have not so much as seen your sister or any of your other guests since the day they came to stay at the manor. Of course you have your duties, but as the head of this manor, you also have a responsibility as their host.”</p>
<p>“Klein,” Whitley sighs, exasperated. “Of course I know that, but I simply don’t have the time. Surely you understand this.”</p>
<p>But Klein is obstinate. “Nothing is more important than family, Master Whitley.” His eyes soften, then. They are a pale brown in the morning sunlight that filters in through the sheer curtains over the windows. He sets down the breakfast tray at last, and says, “When your family comes to you, my dear, no matter how they may have wronged you in the past, please do not turn your back to them. Not for them, but for yourself. You may yet live to see yourself regret if if you shut them out.”</p>
<p>Whitley stares down at the coverlet, at his fingers clenched deep in the silk of it. He makes himself exhale slowly, grounding himself, letting the breath in his hollow ribcage escape until it will flow no longer. Family,” he repeats, in a voice that sounds distant to his own ears and not at all like his own.</p>
<p>Despite his—emotional, less unfriendly than has been their norm for as long as he can remember—reunion with Weiss, he knows nothing has changed. She may pretend to care about him all she likes, but in the end she satisfies nothing but her own conscience in that she has played the role of a good sister and the unbridgeable rift between them is all due to Whitley’s refusal to reciprocate and no fault of her own. It matters not. They stand where they have always stood. Whitley will allow Weiss her play-acting and in exchange withhold her ability to hurt him that she once held long, long ago, when he was too young to know any better.</p>
<p>Klein watches him for a moment.</p>
<p>“Lunch and dinner, young master. Just today and no more, should you wish it.”</p>
<p>The day outside is bright and beautiful, and the fragile, thin sound of birdsong carries crisply through the windows. Whitley reaches out inside himself, for the sunlight falling on his skin, for the warmth that he knows it must have. It doesn’t feel like anything. It never has.</p>
<p>“Klein,” he asks, “Do you think a person should listen, to someone who never listened to them and never so much as pretended to for all the years they spent together? Do you think this person owes the other anything, after years of refused acknowledgement, after years of wilful blindness to their very existence? Do you think this person, who never stopped listening but is finding it hard to continue now, through the pain from years upon years of cold silence, can be expected to listen just one more time?”</p>
<p>Whitley, watching Klein, sees the stricken look that passes over the butler’s kindly, weathered features with a satisfaction that could almost have been malicious if it wasn’t so dull and faded, an aged photograph from which the sunlight has leeched all but the barest shadows of colour. He observes the way he falters infinitesimally, looking at Whitley (with grief, dismay, regret) as if seeing him for the very first time, and waits out the seconds before his response patiently, his heart numb all the way through, feeling like he might drift unmoored from his own body at any moment and never notice the difference.</p>
<p>“Master Whitley,” Klein begins, finally, his voice tremulous. When he meets Whitley’s gaze it is with deep sadness in his eyes, the full weight of every year of his age suddenly apparent in the creases they have worn into his face. “If that person stops listening, they will never hear anything, whether the answer comes or not.”</p>
<p>Whitley cocks his head. Klein is frowning faintly, waiting for a reaction, a new worry carving fresh furrows in the crags of his forehead.</p>
<p>“Silence drives a person mad, I suppose,” Whitley mutters at last, turning his face to drop his gaze sideways onto the haze of reflected sunlight in the marble floor below the window. He does not see the flash of relief that passes over Klein’s face.</p>
<p>Silence takes hold of the air and spins itself out into thick cobwebs, unwilling to break.</p>
<p>When it becomes apparent that Whitley is not about to acknowledge his presence again any time soon, at least not without being prompted, Klein bows slightly although no one is there who can see it. “Will I be making arrangements for lunch, then, young master?”</p>
<p>Whitley gives a sharp little laugh, suddenly. It pierces the air like a shard of broken glass.</p>
<p>“Oh, go ahead,” he says, waving a hand and leaning over the bedclothes towards Klein. His eyes are alarmingly bright. “You will have your way, O master butler. Just today, and then we shall see how things go.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Ruby Rose is petite and painfully earnest. Her silver eyes are wide with unmasked surprise and she has half-lifted her hands from her sides as if to begin a flustered apology and Whitley wonders with a faint note of bitterness if she has ever had to hide anything from anyone in her virtuous young life, ever had to put on a mask and learn it like her own features or risk losing everything. Oh, but that isn’t right, is it? He remembers hearing all about how she and her friends concealed the truth of Salem and the Knowledge relic from the late General Ironwood, piling lie upon lie without so much as blinking those innocent eyes of theirs that shone with infuriating righteousness. He remembers, too, exactly how that ended for all of them. But then Weiss has never believed herself capable of making any mistakes. It stands to reason that the people she surrounded herself with would be the same.</p>
<p>He slides a mirrored-glass smile onto his face and folds his hands behind his back. “Miss Rose, wasn’t it?” he asks, unfailingly courteous.</p>
<p>“Ah…” she says nervously, rubbing the back of her neck. The grand windows in the side of this corridor face east, the way most of the windows in this particular wing of the manor do, and the incandescent pre-noon sunlight that streams through them sets the marble arches and the strands of her red wine hair aglow. “Yep, that’s me. Look, I… I guess you might not be so happy to see me here, and I’m sorry for intruding. But I was just going to get a book from the library, that’s all, Weiss said I could find it here, Blake’s still laid up in bed and she’s been wanting to read something and I swear I was just going to grab her a book and leave…”</p>
<p>She waves her hands and gives up on her rambling explanation with a sheepish little laugh, glancing quickly at Whitley’s face to read his reaction. He quirks an eyebrow at her but otherwise maintains his politely neutral expression.</p>
<p>“Oh, but why might I be displeased to see you here? You are an honoured guest in this home and there are no doors here that are closed to you—well, besides those I trust your own judgement to discern the breaching of which would amount to an invasion of privacy, so perhaps not quite.” Half a joke, but only half, and maybe a threat making up the other half. Klein would disapprove. He keeps his eyes on her and smiles again, more disarmingly, the way he learned through hours of practice before a mirror to smile in dinner parties and over meeting tables, amid the chessboard squares of the ballroom floor’s chequered tiling while his sisters stained their dresses and hair training in the gardens in secret to fight on bloodier battlefields to come. “Please, relax, Miss Rose.”</p>
<p>Ruby Rose smiles back, still slightly uncertain, but only in the way of one still feeling lingering embarrassment. “Right, uh, thank you. Oh! And please call me Ruby, you really don’t have to be so formal. I mean Weiss is my best friend so that practically makes us family… um, sorry, only if you want to be, of course.”</p>
<p>“Ruby, then,” he echoes with a ghost of another insincere smile, and ignores the rest. “May I show you to the library?”</p>
<p>She looks visibly startled. “You probably have way more important things to do…”</p>
<p>“More important than performing a service as trivial as this one for a guest of my home? No, don’t protest—it’s the least I can do. Please, come this way.”</p>
<p>He turns on his heel and begins to walk away down the hallway, his step brisk and assured, and she rushes to follow after a moment’s hesitation, the rhythm of her footsteps syncopated against the tempo set by his. At first he thinks they will make it all the way down to the library in silence—although outwardly the very picture of tranquil disinterest, he is waiting, wondering if she will speak—but it seems Ruby Rose ultimately finds this too awkward to bear. She clears her throat and says, “You must have a lot on your plate these days. We’ve all seen the associates coming in day after day and Klein tells us at every meal that you’re very busy and sends your apologies that you can’t eat with us—which of course is nothing to apologise for! We understand. But I just wanted to say that I think it’s very impressive. You’re so young and yet you’re so capable—for goodness’ sake, Weiss always tells me I wouldn’t so much as last a second in a flea market, I’d get cheated out of all my money.”</p>
<p>Whitley wonders if there is a point to her speech. He says, dryly, “I suppose my dear sister Weiss thinks she rather dodged a bullet in her removal as heiress, in the end.”</p>
<p>There is a brief pause wherein Ruby Rose blinks at his back, momentarily at a loss. “Well… maybe she does. I don’t pretend to know.”</p>
<p>And how delightfully diplomatic of her to say so. Whitley refuses to let his mind dwell on the subject any longer. He tells himself it is a waste of his time. But then Ruby Rose says, her voice softer and more distant, as if only for herself to hear, “You know, I almost can’t picture Weiss growing up here. Even the Weiss who was at Beacon on that first day all those years ago. I don’t know, it’s just—so cold, and she looks so lonely in all the portraits, lonelier than anyone’s soul should ever have had to find strength to bear.”</p>
<p>
  <em>And did Winter and I not look lonely enough for you, my good huntress?</em>
</p>
<p>He knows he shouldn’t respond. He has been trained better than this, he is better than this, but he can’t help—he can’t help but say, in a tone too brittle like a sheet of ice snapping under sustained heat, “And yet this manor saw every one of us, all three of us, grow up.”</p>
<p>She takes in a very little breath behind him and goes quiet, as if slapped.</p>
<p>So far Whitley has lead them both down a stairwell and through a shorter corridor, windowless and lit only by warmer candlelight thrown over the carpet from silver sconces lining the walls. Angry with himself for losing control, he inhales too, shallowly and through his nose, forcing himself to rise and look at his emotion as if from far above a glass box which holds it, small and distant and nothing more than a passing curiosity. A belonging of someone other than him. There is only one corridor that remains, and they make short work of it so that they arrive at the doors of the library still in silence, an ocean’s worth of frozen distance between them in the few steps there that have remained unbridgeable for the entire walk.</p>
<p>When Whitley turns back to Ruby Rose, he has already crafted a new mask of a smile to hide his broken edges with, and the amusing thing is that because there has been no point this morning at which he meant it less than he does now, it looks far more pleasant than any of the other smiles he has given her.</p>
<p>“Here we are,” he says, gesturing to the door. “Do you have a book in mind that I can help you locate, or do you simply wish to browse?”</p>
<p>Ruby Rose does not move an inch. In the low lighting, her silver eyes look more gunmetal grey than anything, resolute but faintly sad.</p>
<p>“Some things are buried deeper down than others. I should have known better,” she says.</p>
<p>Whitley looks at her with frigid scorn and lets his arm drop back to his side.</p>
<p>“Weiss doesn’t talk about it, but I know she left you when you were young. And I’m not trying to defend her—I swear I’m not, but Whitley, I want to tell you what she never thought she had to. Again, I’m not taking her side, or saying she’s right. But the reason why she left you was because she thought you were better suited to this place than she ever was.”</p>
<p>Whitley almost laughs. Almost. “What a comfort it is, to hear those words from you.”</p>
<p>Ruby Rose is shaking her head, a faint look of distress on her features, brushed over compassion that rankles Whitley and makes him itch deep under his skin to tear it off her face with his own fingernails. “No, I… I never meant to imply that belonging in this manor, being born into this life and suited to it, was a bad thing,” she says, and stops before continuing, as if frustrated with her own lack of words with which to express her meaning. She takes a breath.</p>
<p>"Whitley, I know Weiss gave you a lot of shit for it at the time, but she understands now that it’s actually for the best that you inherited the company and not her. She wanted to uphold the Schnee family name’s honour as a huntress, but she couldn’t have done that and run the company at the same time. Fighting on the front lines to protect people wouldn’t change the conditions in the company! It wouldn’t put a stop to the mistreatment of the Faunus in any way. The company itself needed to be reformed from the very foundation up, but—apart from Jacques, no one knows it better than you. She and Winter renounced it and all the political intrigue it entailed, but you embraced it and became determined to make it your strength.”</p>
<p>Here she pauses, again, and looks at Whitley, giving him a space in which to interject if he wants to. He does not speak. He looks at her, expressionless as a statue, waiting for her to continue.</p>
<p>She bites her lip and says, more softly now,</p>
<p>“So yes, Whitley, if you’ll allow me to say as much. This isn’t her place. It’s yours. But it doesn’t indicate some kind of innate cruelty or selfishness in you, or anything. We all have our own paths to walk, and yours just happens to be this one, warfare with your words rather than a weapon—there’s nothing wrong with that at all.”</p>
<p>Such a pretty speech. Where <em>does</em> his sister find these people? <em>I’m sorry, Whitley, but we all have to carve out our own way; one day you’ll understand</em>—at least his eldest sister said goodbye to him, and wasn’t that enough to be grateful for? He was young then. Perhaps she hadn’t seen in his eyes then the cruel stranger that her younger sister would see, later on, fleeing for the stars and her own envisioned destiny on a windy summer’s day just like any other. Perhaps that, then, was a blessing.</p>
<p>Something deep inside him bellows a thunder furious enough to shake the frozen world apart. All at once Whitley’s senses come flooding back to him.</p>
<p>“A word of advice: don’t presume to talk about matters you know nothing about,” he hisses in her startled face, every word spat dripping with acid, his hands clenched into fists by his sides. She opens her mouth to say something, but he turns his back in a gesture of cold finality and walks away.</p>
<p>“Thank you for letting us stay, despite everything,” is the last thing she calls after him, her tone repulsively sincere. Whitley grits his teeth. He walks faster.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Later on, when he has the time to, Whitley regrets his reaction to Ruby Rose’s words. If he has cut ties with Weiss, if she means nothing to him any longer, if she cannot hurt him any longer—what explanation is there for his weakness, repeated slip-up after slip-up after slip-up? It is inexcusable, all of it. He is being childish, and he still has two meals to take with the lot of them, about which well-intentioned Klein is determined not to let him forget. Still, Whitley finds himself drifting to the kitchens, down an old path well-worn in years past by pattering feet smaller than his now.</p>
<p>Klein is there, sure enough, issuing orders to the skeleton kitchen staff that remained after Jacques Schnee’s arrest. When he notices Whitley, his eyes brighten and he turns around after dismissing the staff back to their work.</p>
<p>“Master Whitley! What brings you down here?” His eyes narrow in suspicion and he leans in, mock-seriously, to ask, “You aren’t trying to get out of lunch, are you?”</p>
<p>“Of course not,” Whitley laughs. The tension bleeds out of his shoulders somewhat. “I just felt… at a loss, I suppose. Not having much to prepare for today.”</p>
<p>Klein nods in understanding. Just then, one of the cooks, a dumpy middle-aged woman with kindly eyes and a motherly smile who has served the Schnee family for as long as Whitley can remember, sweeps by with a bowl of egg whites only whisked halfway to becoming meringue and pushes it into his arms. Surprised, Whitley stumbles half a step back.</p>
<p>“Well, Master Whitley, there’s plenty to do and plenty to prepare for down here, if that’s what you’re looking for!” She winks at him, full of mischief. “Make yourself useful, why don’t you?”</p>
<p>Whitley looks down at the bowl in his arms, uncertain. “I’m… afraid I’ll only get in the way, Mrs Abbott.”</p>
<p>“If you have time enough to spend moping around, you have time enough to learn, little boy-CEO,” she says wisely. Then she is gone again, disappeared through a doorway into an adjoining section of the kitchen.</p>
<p>In her wake, Klein only laughs at Whitley’s obvious discomfort. “You heard her, young master. Off you go.”</p>
<p>“Klein,” Whitley says, stopping him. “I ran into one of Weiss’s friends, earlier.”</p>
<p>The look in his eyes is half apologetic and half pleading. Klein seems to understand immediately what he means to convey.</p>
<p>“No transgressions that won’t be remedied over a lovely three-course meal and, failing that, a seven-course one later in the day.” When he smiles, his eyes are painfully kind and forgiving. “Master Whitley, you know your sister’s friends are the understanding sort. And as for you, quiet your restless mind with work, and think no more, do you hear me?”</p>
<p>He reaches up and pats Whitley’s head while he is too surprised to move. For a wild moment Whitley thinks he is going to give him a comforting hug, and perhaps Klein does consider it for a fraction of a second, but he doesn’t follow through, like Whitley is a frightened wild animal that might be scared off by a careless action. Afterwards, when he disappears to see to other duties in that mysterious, ever-reliable way of his, Whitley takes the bowl into the main kitchen where Mrs Abbott had gone.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Seated at the head of the long table, with Weiss’s friends flanking him in two long lines down the dining room, Whitley experiences a strange sensation, like he has put on ill-fitting clothing but it is too late now for him to change out of them. He realises it is foolishness. He feels like a child play-acting, brought to a gathering by his older sister who took him aside before the event and warned him to behave himself in front of her friends.</p>
<p>At first he almost dares not meet Ruby Rose’s eyes when she enters the room with the others, but when he finally manages to look at her, he finds her gazing back. She offers him a slight dip of her head and a soft smile, through which she mouths two syllables: <em>sorry</em>.</p>
<p>He almost stares and laughs. What has she to apologise for?</p>
<p>Even so, he does not get to dwell on it for very long. Weiss’s friends arrange themselves along the table with ease, settling into their seats as the indistinct murmurs of their separate conversations brought through the door with them wind down one by one, and although he watches them carefully, it does not seem that their de facto leader has told them anything of their encounter. Three of their number are missing, the three who were injured when they arrived and were put on bedrest by Klein. Apart from that, they seem almost jarringly normal.</p>
<p>The table is already set with the food, a steaming feast piled high on silver platters. Two servers come forward quietly to divide the dishes into portions for the guests. One of the two, before she leaves, flashes Whitley a surprisingly cheeky smile, considering he can’t remember ever having spoken to her before. She turns and addresses the table demurely, saying, “One of our esteemed cooks requested that I pass on a message from her. She wishes that it be made known to the guests that Master Whitley assisted with the preparation of lunch today, and without him, the spread would be in a very different state indeed.”</p>
<p>So saying, she bows and exits the room just as silently as her fellow server did, leaving Whitley to his fate. That parting remark, he knows, is a hidden jab at him and quoted directly from the cook in question herself. He sighs internally.</p>
<p>“Whitley did?” Weiss says, as if unsure of where they stand, whether she is permitted to tease him or not. Whitley glares at his plate. Let her waver.</p>
<p>“Yes,” he says shortly. “I found myself rather unoccupied this morning, so the cooks <em>very kindly</em> offered me a remedy for my situation.”</p>
<p>“Oh, he’s so formal!” coos the girl sitting next to him, who he vaguely remembers being introduced to him as ‘Nora’, reaching out a hand as if intending to squeeze Whitley’s cheek with it. Only his wide-eyed, frosty glare and the sound of Weiss awkwardly clearing her throat seems to make her think better of it. “Weiss, you never told me how cute your little brother was!”</p>
<p>“Right…” Weiss says. “Cute. Of course.”</p>
<p>"Nora," someone says mildly, a young man with black hair like a glossy silk ribbon down to his waist. The girl sticks her tongue out at him but leaves Whitley be.</p>
<p>Weiss shakes her head slightly as if to clear something from it. She addresses Whitley again, suddenly, to ask, “Is Mother not coming for lunch, by the way?”</p>
<p>“Mother?” Whitley echoes. “No, I’m afraid not. Her own choice. She’s doing better now, but she doesn’t feel ready yet, to stand before all of you.”</p>
<p>This, said casually, candidly—Weiss’s friends are more than aware of their mother’s situation, and Whitley sees no sense in beating around the bush. Still, in his peripheral vision, he sees some of them look down at their food awkwardly. Weiss sighs sadly.</p>
<p>“I’ve seen her a handful of times this past week, but not much more than that. I’m glad she’s doing better, though.”</p>
<p>Whitley fingers the stem of his glass. “Yes. Of course. She’s leaving at the end of next week for the family vacation home in Argus; did she tell you? It’ll be even better for her then, to get out of this place and all the unhappy memories she has associated with it.”</p>
<p>“She did…” Weiss trails off, something reluctant in her tone. She has been pushing her food absently around her plate; now she looks down at it, puts a forkful of roast potatoes in her mouth, and chews on it slowly. After swallowing it, she asks, her tone a shade lower now, “And you? You’ll be alone, here, once we’ve gone too.”</p>
<p>Whitley gives her an opaque smile. “A fine time to start caring about that sort of silly little thing now, dear sister. But you know I’ll be fine. With all the work waiting to be done, perhaps I’ll be lucky if I ever catch a wink of sleep again once the paperwork is all done and the company is fully mine.”</p>
<p>A tinge of hurt flashes in Weiss’s eyes, fleeting and fragile, but she visibly makes herself brush past the moment. “I suppose you’re right. Even these past few days you’ve been terribly busy.”</p>
<p>“Yes,” Whitley says with finality, lacking the heart to twist the knife deeper but equally as unwilling to soften, and leaves it at that. The rest of lunch passes uneventfully and, thankfully, relatively painlessly—Weiss’s friends gradually begin to ask him questions of their own, mostly curious about the kind of work he has been doing so far, and how his meetings have been going. To his own pleasant surprise, he finds himself relaxing too, set far more at ease than he thought he could ever be in their company, a violin string unravelling from the scroll. At the end of the meal, when the dessert has been cleared away (in large part thanks to the quite frankly alarming appetite that the girl Nora turned out to possess) and the rest have trickled out of the dining room like sand through a cracked hourglass, Weiss remains.</p>
<p>“I’m glad you were able to have lunch with us today,” she says to him.</p>
<p>Whitley shrugs. “Then you’ll enjoy having the incomparable delight of my company at dinner, too.”</p>
<p>Weiss laughs. She falters, then, in that same uncertain way like she doesn’t know if she has permission to or not. For an extended, quiet moment, she only looks at him, long and hard. Then she says, thoughtfully, slowly, “You’ve changed, haven’t you? I see it in your eyes. And it took me much longer, too, even with the benefit of the catalyst I had in Beacon.”</p>
<p>Whitley doesn’t answer. Weiss watches him a moment longer, and says, “You know I still have to leave. I’m sorry. It’s the path I’ve chosen. But you don’t need me anymore, do you?”</p>
<p>Ruby Rose’s words float back to him, in that dulcet, gentle voice of hers. <em>She left because she thought you were better suited to this place than she ever was.</em> His sisters never knew any better. It wasn’t until all three of them were older, and wiser, did they start to see the things their narrow fields of vision never encompassed. Yes, the hour is far too late, and Whitley has only ever known how to forget and never to forgive—but when the hands of a clock approach midnight, their inexorable march only ever takes them tipping over into the tentative beginning of the next day.</p>
<p>“No,” he says. “I don’t.”</p>
<p>And at this Weiss smiles, glad and bright and weightless, a wave crest of relief breaking the surface of a stony grey ocean. “Good.”</p>
<p>Whitley looks away.</p>
<p>“And how are your injured friends doing under Klein’s care? Well, I hope. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to visit.”</p>
<p>“Oh…” Weiss’s smile fades. “Fine, yes. They’re doing better now. It was kind of you to let us stay.”</p>
<p>Whitley side-eyes her. “It’s your home, too.”</p>
<p>Weiss blinks in surprise. Her pretty mouth opens slightly, and then her pupils go unfocused with some kind of dreamy haziness, as if fixed on something far, far away on the horizon.</p>
<p>“Yes,” she says, after a pause. “I suppose it is.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p> </p>
<p>(interlude: a dream, or not a dream)</p>
<p>Whitley finds him sitting on the top step leading down to the patio that overlooks the garden, nestled at the side of the manor. It is midnight, and the moon is full and bright in the sky, like a silver coin or distant eye. At this sleepless hour only ghosts and the empty winds that bear them haunt the manor; Whitley is well used to this, has learned to count himself among their number, but even viewed from the back, at a distance, this person is too warm to be anything but living and breathing and rosy-cheeked. When he approaches the figure, he doesn’t quite know why, either, only that this night does not seem to wear loneliness as well as the other nights have.</p>
<p>The figure almost certainly senses his approach before he speaks, but he does not move, so Whitley takes this as permission to draw close and lower himself to sit down beside him. When the boy turns, his eyes are full of reflected starlight.</p>
<p>“Hi,” he says.</p>
<p>“Hello,” Whitley says. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember your name.”</p>
<p>The boy does not take offence; he only blinks, slow and steady. “We haven’t really spoken before. I’m Oscar Pine.”</p>
<p>“Whitley Schnee.” He doesn’t hold his hand out for a handshake the way he habitually does; under the revealing gaze of the moon, such a thing seems strangely frivolous. The boy—Oscar—laughs, and says, “I know. I’d be a poor excuse of a guest if I was so ungrateful to my host I didn’t even know his name. What are you doing out here at this hour, anyway? Can’t sleep?”</p>
<p>“It’s like this on most nights.”</p>
<p>“And yet I haven’t run into you before now.”</p>
<p>“Technically, I ran into you,” Whitley corrects. “And I don’t usually come to this part of the manor. I usually keep to my own wing.” Tonight, the sleeplessness has lasted far beyond its usual welcome, and so his feet have taken him further down the twisting corridors, as if lost in a dream into which their master cannot follow.</p>
<p>The boy hums thoughtfully. “I see. The moon is beautiful tonight, though. Can you see it from your wing?”</p>
<p>“No,” Whitley says.</p>
<p class="p1">“Well, you can look at it now,” Oscar says, and lapses into silence. Obediently, as if this entire tableau makes perfect sense, Whitley tilts his head up and follows his gaze into the sky. The two of them gaze at the moon for the perfect stillness of a few unbroken moments, its luminous form almost seeming to swell to fill Whitley’s vision, maddeningly serene and secretive and somnolent; after what seems like an eternity, Whitley drags his gaze from the moon and meets Oscar’s gaze at the exact same time that the other boy turns his face back, eyes silver but uncursed by the weight of that particular brand of responsibility.</p>
<p>“You’re my age, aren’t you?” he asks.</p>
<p>“Eighteen.”</p>
<p>“Eighteen,” Oscar echoes, nodding. “Yeah. Still young but getting older. It’s at eighteen that most people graduate from the academies, you know? I was fourteen when the old headmaster showed up in my head. He didn’t want any of that, either. I was fifteen when I came to Atlas for the first time. And now all I can do is wonder, always wonder—what my life would have been if it had stayed my own.”</p>
<p>Whitley remembers him, now. The reincarnation host. The vessel for an eons-old legacy too big and too heavy not to stumble under, the weight of the sky on a pair of weary shoulders. “Would you take it back, if you could?”</p>
<p>“Would I, indeed?” Something twists at Oscar’s mouth, as if it might split into a humourless laugh. “I don’t know. Ah, it doesn’t really matter now, anyway.”</p>
<p>“Maybe it does.”</p>
<p>Oscar curls in on himself, drawing his knees closer into his chest so he can rest his chin on them. Again, the stars flicker, drowned, in the bottomless pool of his dark eyes. “I want to go to one of the huntsmen academies,” he says, abruptly, and does laugh then, startled, a staccato burst sharp enough to shake some clarity back into the foggy surface of Whitley’s sleep-deprived mind. “You’re the first person I’ve told that. I guess it’s because I don’t know you.”</p>
<p>“You should go,” Whitley says. “You should get to live again. Reincarnate. Like the old man.”</p>
<p>Oscar shakes his head, laughing. “It’s a silly idea. But he’d like that, I suppose. In all his lifetimes, I think he liked being a headmaster best.”</p>
<p>“So let’s say you do enrol in an academy. Where do you want to go? Beacon?” Whitley asks, and Oscar pulls a face.</p>
<p>“No,” he says dismissively. “It’s where all of them went. I’m sick of their shadows.”</p>
<p>“Haven Academy? Shade? Or Atlas, then?”</p>
<p>Oscar cuts him a sideways glance, unreadable. Then he sighs. “I come from Mistral,” he says. “My only family was my aunt, and she’s dead. Not even from the war. Cancer, I heard, while we were off gallivanting in Vacuo.”</p>
<p>“I’m sorry,” Whitley says quietly.</p>
<p>“Don’t be.” Oscar waves a hand. “That was two years ago. She didn’t have to see the chaos our world descended into, and I’ve had the time to make my peace with it.” He stares at the ground, lost in thought. Then he seems to come back into himself suddenly, with a little shudder, like a ghost has just walked over his grave. “But yeah. What am I talking about? I’m talking crazy. It’s too late at night, and the moon is too bright. Don’t you have to wake up early tomorrow for work?”</p>
<p>“I’ll be fine,” Whitley says. He can see that Oscar’s eyes have shuttered from the fatigue of an unknowable sadness, and he just wants to be left alone, now; the window for conversation has closed. “You should try to get some sleep, too. Will you go back to bed?”</p>
<p>Oscar manages to smile vaguely. “In a few minutes, I promise. I just want to watch the moon a little longer…”</p>
<p>He is only a stranger, and it isn’t his place to insist, so Whitley inclines his head and gets to his feet. “Goodnight,” he says, and Oscar repeats the farewell, soft and absent. He leaves him sitting there, his back small and lonely, framed in the unfolded magnificence of a night sky seen from the top of the world reaching for the stratosphere and beyond, its arrogance unparalleled by any other who would break the glittering skyline.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The beginning of the next week dawns swift and sudden, and by this time all three of Weiss’s injured friends have recovered admirably enough to move around the manor alone and unsupported. It is at dinner, on one of Whitley’s rare free nights, that they break the news to him—they’re leaving in two days. They’re grateful for his hospitality, but they’ve overstayed their welcome, and there are still more places they have to visit and do what they can at, people that need whatever help they can give them.</p>
<p>“I understand. Still, just to let you know that the option is on the table, you can stay,” Whitley says, and from the other side of the table, Oscar’s kaleidoscope eyes flick up to meet his. He clears his throat uncomfortably and pulls his gaze away, sweeping it over the others. “If you want. All of you. The manor’s empty now, anyway, and Klein won’t mind a few extra people to take care of.”</p>
<p>There are a few nods of gratitude and spoken ‘thank you’s, subdued but genuine. He feels Weiss’s gaze soft and warm on the side of his face, and Ruby’s, pensive, like she is looking at something she can’t quite place. Neither of them say anything. Last of all he looks back at Oscar—is surprised to see the boy still looking directly at him, his expression unreadable. This time Whitley pulls himself straighter, reaching for the facade of the ever-composed Schnee scion that he once wore as a second skin but now seems so fragile, refusing to show a single trace of the bone-deep tiredness he feels, and looks him in the eye with a slight tilt of his head.</p>
<p>Oscar matches the tilt. The corners of his lips curve faintly, in a smile, and he nods once. He says nothing.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Weiss’s party leaves in the morning anyway. The airships are still down and the train lines are out of service, but they say they’ll go back to Mantle and stay with the Happy Huntresses, where they’ll be better positioned to help the citizens rebuild their lives. (What they don’t say: where they’ll be out of the way to give him time and space, to rebuild his own world and find his own identity.) He says his goodbyes to them at dinner, stiffly formal where he sits at the head of the table with his back ramrod-straight like a proper head of the Schnee family, and the next morning, he does not come to see them off but sends Klein with his apologies and excuses of feigned poor health. When they leave, he watches their distant figures walk down the hill with their luggage in tow from his darkened bedroom through a crack in the curtains, sitting with his knees drawn to his chest in a huge armchair pulled up next to the window, feeling small and like a child again. He looks until they disappear beneath the snowy tree-line for good, and feels his fabricated sickness crawl up his throat, like it is coming true as punishment for his lying. He closes the curtains all the way, snuffing out the trail of sunlight lingering on the marble floor; he climbs stiffly into his bed, leaving the chair by the window, and sleeps until the sun sets.</p>
<p>He only wakes because Klein knocks on the door, softly but firmly. He has always been a light sleeper since even before the war, but all the conflict has further sharpened his senses to invisible edges, so that he sits up immediately at the knock, wide awake. The darkness of the room disorients him. He blinks senselessly at the opposite wall until the memory of watching Weiss and her friends leave comes back to him, and then he calls for Klein to come in.</p>
<p>The butler clucks his tongue as he enters, setting his tray on the stand by the door in order to flick on the lights. Whitley throws an arm up to shield his eyes and sees the shape of Klein move towards him from under it, a hand braced on his hip.</p>
<p>“Young master,” he says, his tone gentle but chiding. “Oh dear, oh dear. Look at you. Come on, out of bed we get.”</p>
<p>Owlishly, Whitley blinks at him. Klein sighs. He turns and retrieves the tray, selecting a few silver-domed dishes to lay out on the table beneath the dais where his bed stands, then arranging silverware beside the spread. When he returns he holds his hands out to Whitley with an expectant look in his eye, the same way he used to when Whitley was no taller than his waist and needed to be lifted out of bed. Numbly, almost automatically, he lifts his arms and lets Klein pull the covers off him and guide him out of bed down to the table.</p>
<p>“I suppose you aren’t hungry,” Klein says.</p>
<p>Whitley manages to shake his head. He isn’t.</p>
<p>“That’s what happens when you sleep all day like you did,” Klein says, gently admonishing again although his eyes are painfully kind. “Well, eat what you can. I’ll come back again later.”</p>
<p>He disappears out of the door and closes it behind him softly, leaving Whitley with his dinner. He picks at it. They are all his favourite dishes, but his mouth is dry, and he cannot bring himself to swallow more than a few mouthfuls. When at last the door opens again, Klein does not comment on the barely touched state of the meal. He only clears away the dishes, bids Whitley goodnight, and leaves as quietly as he had the first time. Left alone again, Whitley makes himself brush his teeth and change into a fresh set of nightclothes. He pulls the curtains open again so the sunlight will wake him in the morning, turns off the lights, and climbs mechanically back into bed.</p>
<p>It is some time before he manages to sleep again. This time, he dreams—of voices in the manor, raised in argument in his father’s study; of a living ghost drifting through the hallways and cowering at the sound of wine bottles smashing on marble; of high heels clicking endlessly to a toneless metronome beat on the floor outside his bedroom in the dead of night as people come and go, echoing and echoing and echoing through the empty air as he listens with his ear pressed to the door; and at last, at the very end, a person with a pair of impossibly green eyes that glow in the unsettling wrongness of the void where their face should be, coming closer, saying something that Whitley almost can’t make out but sounds a little like <em>young Schnee, so good to see you again after all these years, you look just like your father, how has your mother been, how nice to see that you—</em></p>
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